Not Your Average Climbing Film: Taking An Unexpected Direction In Yosemite

Check the smoke out in the valley. You should be able to see all of this stuff. You can still see it coming over the top. It's crazy smoky. This is Eli's sixth trad lead and he chose like a relatively benign place to do it. It's a pretty unknown spot. Yeah. So he just led up to Silverfish Corner. This thing. Look at that line. I like the squamor. I think it's good for a 70-grammer tactical. But these arrived like brand new the other day. How's it going Eli? Good. It's almost dinner time. The big wall was super fun. Setting up the bivvy was... hectic. To say the least. It got dark really fast. Didn't have the headlamps out. It's a hang and play. Yep. No ledge to stand on. We've got some... Salami. Some... saag paneer. What happened with the other saag paneer? We have a little casualty in the bag. Snowing ash. Huge fires up to the east. Actually making the sky red. After that evening... I was just feeling beat down. Realising that there were so many... of these mid 12 pitches. Kind of like E4, E5. Or E6 depending. I just realised that... you've just got to be cruising them. You can't red point that many pitches. Then you get to the cruxes. It's kind of ironic that... I wasn't particularly intimidated by the cruxes. The crux pitches you can spend time on them. They're aesthetically easier. There's 12 D's on that route. I went up one time and I'm like... OK, I can do this again. It's not a problem. I know what I'm doing. But then there's 12 B's. Which is just like this funky... Yosemite style climbing. I'm terrible at it. It's morning. I want to sleep more. Check out the view. Pretty cool little sunrise going on. Just kind of intimidated by the... climbing we're going to have to do today. Going to go down. Rework the traverse pitch. Then we go down. Over there somewhere. And then we go up again. How was your first night? Slept super well. Yeah? Nice. Besides the smoke. The view is perfect. So much smoke. These wildfires. I'm not sure I approve. That morning. Led a couple more pitches. One of them was 11 D. It was legitimately quite scary. Quite poor gear. I really ran out to a peg you could wobble with your finger. I was just like, I don't know. I'm done. It was just... A weight lifted from my shoulders. I'm not quite ready for this route. I don't have the necessary Yosemite style skills. Had a good sleep last night. And decided that I don't know. I think this route is too much for me. It seems at the moment my head is not in a great place for hard leading. In the spring I was super psyched. Yeah, it's good. It's taken big falls. It's getting up on it's grill. But today, it's not happening. So what you're seeing now isn't up the bale. We're just going to go up as fast as we can. And we'll be off before the storm comes. Getting over to the next ledge. The traverse is in sight. How's it going Eli? Are you hanging on that block? But wait, what's that block held on by? What are you doing and why? Just pulling the tangiest rope in the world. Before it tangles with all the other ropes. And we're on the chicken head ledge. It's an amazing ledge. Look at it. And the sunset is just happening. And this is probably the best ledge I've ever been on. And our route carries on up there. Carrying on with the bale. The up bale. The upward bale. Stylish up bale. Look at this mess. I can't do it from this angle. Somehow failure is always more interesting than success. Every time I've gone and succeeded on something the requirement for introspection and learning is somehow diminished by the fact that it went well. Guy goes to climb XYZ. It was hard. But he overcame because he's strong. It's pretty much the story of every climbing movie ever made. This video is a bit different. Guy goes to climb XYZ, finds it hard, lacks motivation, has poor head game and bales. It's quite close. Damn it boils so fast. Crazy Jet boil. Jet used to boils. Today the strength of the wildfire went down the other valley system. Kind of missed the main part so much. Much nicer this morning. I wouldn't get rained on by ash quite as much. Video tape my first wall poop. Pooping in a bag like normal. You need to make big fuss. We're going to give you stage fright. Today at cooking school we're going to show you how to make oats in the jet boil. Make the water hot with fire. Second, open the package. Be sure that when you open the package you open it at the top not the middle. Then, put the package in the hot water stir vigorously and you're done. I've been doing this pitch, technically easiest ever to climb in. It just goes down this like ledgey, bushy off-widthy struggly with just loose blocks in it. Vicious. But the rope drag is so severe. I'm just going to put up all the rope make a fixed anchor for Eli Tejuba and I'm just going to have to solo the last bit to get to the ledge. The smoke is grating its way out of the valley. I've managed to break my gris-gris climbing the off-width. It must have got stuck out and then I pushed off it with my back. That was some bulk there. How's it going Eli? It was clear cut. I just didn't want to project the route anymore. And the question is why? I've had other projects which I had and I persisted on them and just kept going. Perhaps it was because it was such a massive challenge and it was not something I'd even really dreamt of doing. I had not even googled the route or studied the topic before arriving in the valley. Perhaps it was because after nine months of track climbing I was losing my drive for it. Perhaps it was just being in the hot seat and having to work out all the beta. It was just getting a bit much. At that point in time it was probably a mix of all three but it really boiled down to two things. I was not good enough. I felt like I could successfully red-point the croc switches especially if you lined them up on the ground. But in between them there are loads of mid to high 512s and I was just not cruising them. I was finding them hard. To do a route like this, 512b should not be an issue. Although 7b would be no problem on sport on this funky Yosemite weirdness I'm just not good enough. And number two, I didn't want it bad enough. In spring I wanted the leaning tower badly. It meant something to me. I took huge whips. I tried to climb it when it was soaking wet and running with water. This time I just didn't want to fall. At all. I didn't want to take the risk. And to take the risk and to fire up the cylinders it seems that I really need to want it. In all I freed or very close freed 22 or 33 pitches. I also sent my first trad 13b. And I learnt a lot about what it takes to do a route like this. I know how I would approach it if I was going to go back and try it again. I know the strategy, the approach and the training that I would need to do. I'm going to let this one brew in my head. Maybe I will want it enough in the future. Maybe this could still be the standard climbing story and this is just the bit where I struggle. Time will tell. I feel no pressure. And now for a special feature. Merits of the mullet. So Eli, you have been sporting this fantastic mullet for the last few weeks. Now, what's the reason for the mullet? And why are you trying to bring it back? The mullet is the ultimate climbers haircut. Because I can wear a helmet no problem. No hair in the way. I can climb all day in the hot sun without worrying about burning my neck or my ears. And if it's cold it will also keep me warm. It's also the ultimate in style. The mullet is definitely coming back in fashion. I see it all around the valley. Catalonia for sure. Serrano is covered in mullets. Actually Loman, Idaho seems to be a bit saturated as well. Imagine. No, it's an 80's resurgence. That's what's happening now. So that's the end of Merits of the mullet.